Begging Crackdown May Cost City Many Quarters

Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s failure to stop police officers from enforcing an anti-panhandling statute long considered unconstitutional could end up costing the city millions of dollars.A federal judge on Tuesday certified a class-action lawsuit on behalf of beggars who had been arrested or ticketed under the state’s now defunct anti-panhandling statute. A federal court first ordered that the statute stop being enforced in 1992, finding that it violated the First Amendment. Since then, the city has not managed to successfully disseminate the court’s instructions to its police officers. In recent months, NYPD officers have continued to issue summonses for violations of the law once every other day, according to the decision.In the past four years alone, the NYPD has used the defunct law to issue more than 1,500 summonses and prosecute more than 50 people. The class action is also against other police departments across the state. The story was first reported in the New York Post.In granting class action status to the suit, the judge, Shira Scheindlin of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, wrote that most of the class members are too poor to sue on their own.“As a consequence of being poor and homeless, most absent plaintiffs are uninformed, disenfranchised and without the means to bring individual actions in the hope of having their convictions overturned or their extant warrants vacated,” the decision said. Earlier this year, Judge Scheindlin declined to find the city in contempt of court for continuing to enforce the defunct law. She wrote then that the city “is now striving to fully comply” and has “made avoiding contempt a top priority.” The city law department released a statement saying it is considering “all legal options.”A lawyer for the plaintiffs, Matthew Brinckerhoff, told the Associated Press that the class could include as many as 10,000 plaintiffs.

Begging Crackdown May Cost City Many Quarters

Begging Crackdown May Cost City Many Quarters

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